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Zeldapedia talk:Policy
I'm assuming our current definition of "active" is tentative since there has been absolutely no discussion on the matter that I am aware of. That said, we need to decide on a working definition of active before we go around enforcing it. The definition Minish added seems far to stringent to me, assuming "most of the days" of a month means at least 50% of the days in a month. Minish himself only barely meets that requirement (14 days out of 27) and was inactive in January, AK meets it but still close most months, and I have been "inactive" for consecutive months, including the current one. Oni and Xykeb are also "inactive" during this month if we use that definition, and likely past months from what I remember of their editing frequencies. I was also surprised to see that Jazzi/EP would have been "inactive" for the past couple of months. Green Rupee is the only active member who easily meets this requirement. The idea of "active" that I've had in my head for a long time is "at least one non-userpage edit (e.g. mainspace, article talk page, uploading an image specifically for the mainspace, etc.) in the last two weeks". After seeing what Minish's idea is, that's definitely going to seem too lenient. I'm thinking that "x number of non-userpage edits in the last month" will be the best way to define this. Maybe 25 edits a month? More? Less? Discuss. Jedimasterlink (talk) 00:50, February 28, 2013 (UTC) :So I'm thinking it should probably be less edits. Something like 15 (about half of each month of the year) edits the previous month could be a good definition. Green Rupee 02:10, February 28, 2013 (UTC) ::Looking back over people's actual edit counts makes 15 look a lot more reasonable. Some of us are barely pushing 15 edits a month as it is. Yikes...I knew our activity as a community had declined a lot from how active we used to be, but that really puts it into perspective. Jedimasterlink (talk) 04:42, February 28, 2013 (UTC) :::15 edits sounds fine to me. (And for the record, here was an extremely half-assed discussion on the Skype channel about what it meant to be active, but the conclusion ended up being pretty arbitrary.) ''Xykeb Yvolix '' 10:03, February 28, 2013 (UTC) ::::Sounds fine to me as well. My apologies, I probably should have put something in the summary about how there was some form of "discussion" and I wasn't just jumping the gun. ~Minish (talk) 20:47, February 28, 2013 (UTC) :::::In hindsight I wondered if something had happened on Skype, but either way it looked like not a lot of thought was put into it (which Xykeb pretty much confirmed). We needed a definition right that moment, though, so I see why it happened the way it did. So, do we write down the 15 edits/month standard now or wait for AK and EP to weigh in? It looks like they may have not had a chance to see this yet. Jedimasterlink (talk) 22:32, February 28, 2013 (UTC) ::::::AK mentioned on Skype last night that he's just being kind of inactive on the wiki and Jazzi told me she doesn't really want to get involved in the discussion anyway, so I'll go ahead and write it down. ~Minish (talk) 22:39, February 28, 2013 (UTC) Honestly, I don't think it's a good rule to make voting requirements so stringent. First of all, nowhere on your voting policy does it say anything about inactivity being criteria for removing a vote. It just says minimum of one month active and 150 total contributions. Yes, I'm aware now that it does say that on Zeldapedia:Policy; someone should make sure those policies agree with each other. And IMO, the month of activity/150 total contribs is really all that should be required. Bureaucrats always have the right to disregard particularly uninformed and poorly reasoned votes. I don't see any benefit in forbidding good faith semi-active editors from having a vote on the wiki. And telling people "well if you're not averaging 15 edits per month then you're not a full fledged member of the community" discourages them from being active rather than the other way around. Jeff (talk| ) 16:26, March 2, 2013 (UTC) :You're misreading the voting requirements. It says a month of activity at the time that voting takes place, not by the time. In other words, you need to have been active for a month prior to voting, not just have a month of active editing sometime in your entire history of browsing the wiki. It's been this way for a long time, the only difference is that now we have a definition of what "active" means. I guess we could stand to make that particular rule clearer, though. ''Xykeb Yvolix '' 16:52, March 2, 2013 (UTC) ::Yeah, that's worded really unclearly. And I still think it's still a bad rule. You're complaining about a drop off in editing and a lack of active editors, and yet you've got the most stringent requirements for "activity" I've ever encountered on a Wikia-hosted wiki with some regulars wanting to make them even more stringent. Jeff (talk| ) 18:23, March 2, 2013 (UTC) :::If we didn't have this rule, a user that hasn't edited since 2006 could come in randomly and vote on an adminship request that he or she knows virtually nothing about. Policies, the community, and the general dynamic of an entire wiki can change in an inactive user's absence. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to ask that people get reacquainted with a wiki before contributing to an important discussion (concerning a user they may not even know, mind you) that could potentially affect the entire site. Besides, how on earth is 15 edits a month stringent? You can literally make those edits in an hour. EDIT: Looking back on your original complaint... you are aware that this isn't 15 edits for every month you've been registered, right? It just means that in order to be an active member of the community right now, you have have made 15 edits strewn throughout this single past month. That's all. ''Xykeb Yvolix '' 18:36, March 2, 2013 (UTC) ::::Making 15 edits in just a couple of days isn't that difficult. It took me less than half an hour to make eight edits just a couple of days ago, and that's over half the minimum number of edits I need to make in a month. So, we're talking an hour or two of time on the wiki spent editing, spread out over about 30 days. If you only edit six days out of the month, you'd only have to spend ten to twenty minutes contributing (assuming you aren't rewriting an entire page or something) to remain "active". Even with as busy as I've been lately, that's easily doable. Jedimasterlink (talk) 22:25, March 2, 2013 (UTC) Has there been problems as of late with people not being "active" claiming they have been active? I'm just trying to understand why this discussion has started. --Birdman5589 (talk) 03:44, March 4, 2013 (UTC) :It basically got started because for some reason we started interpreting the voting rules differently than we had in the past. In the ToC suggestions, we have been using this interpretation for quite some time, but looking back over past RfAs makes it clear that the rule about activity didn't always mean what it does now. Once I noticed that, I started thinking that our current interpretation is inferior to the old one, which meant that you had to have been active for one month (meaning active for a month at some point in the past) rather than be active over the course of the 30 previous days or whatever. Yes, the rules actually say be rather than have been, but at the rule's creation it was apparently meant to be interpreted as have been. :The reason that older interpretation is better: people who are currently inactive on the wiki can still make sound judgements about the user's qualifications (via their contributions) and the current state of the wiki (via recent changes, the various logs, etc). In the ToC suggestions, we say that you have to give a reason to support/oppose, yet in RfAs, we only assume this is true. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason to restrict people capable of sound judgement from voting just because they haven't hit the edit button enough lately. :Since the current conception of "active" began in the ToC suggestions, I decided to investigate how that happened to see if there was a legitimate reason for it. Joe added the rule on June 14, 2010. It would make sense to assume that the rule was added to keep people from rushing 50 crappy edits just to vote on suggestions, given that this is concern in other discussions on the talk page. Unfortunately, there is no discussion on the wiki that I can reference to prove this. Regardless, I'm certain that we didn't start blocking returning users from voting until much later than that. In the RfAs, we didn't start interpreting the activity rule this way until Green Rupee's currently active request. In several past runs, people who were definitely inactive at the time (such as Triforce14) would make votes without any issue being made about it. Nobody questioned his right to vote because his reasoning was still good. Why did this change? Because we started interpreting the rule in a slightly yet radically different way. :tl;dr This new rule about activity is based entirely on an interpretation of the rule different from the one we've been using for years, which is understandably confusing and alienating veteran contributors who happen to be less active at the moment. The purpose of the rule is to keep people from voting for poor reasons, and the old interpretation achieves this purpose without locking anyone out from the community. :still tl;dr Let's remove the rule. It's stupid, and I was stupid for thinking it was a good idea. Jedimasterlink (talk) 06:19, March 4, 2013 (UTC) ::I honestly don't think it's an unreasonable rule to attempt to implement to avoid votes like "I don't actually know what's been going on lately, but...", which have never really sat well with me even when we've seen them in the past. However, I definitely agree that we've gotten sort of pedantic about this as of late, and we could do with a legit, serious discussion before implementing it mid-request. ''Xykeb Yvolix '' 11:45, March 4, 2013 (UTC) :::I agree that we need to limit votes like that somehow. If someone obviously doesn't know what's been going on, that should be a good reason to remove the vote. I didn't make that alternate suggestion very clear, though. I sort of led up to it without directly stating it. Anyway, even though Birdman has been "inactive", he clearly demonstrated that he figured out how we've been doing over the last month. It doesn't seem fair to block him and others from voting if they actually know what they're talking about. I find it very strange that one of the ToC rules is that you have to give a reason for supporting a fight suggestion, yet no similar rule is listed on the RfA page. If we added that rule instead and enforced it, I think that would sufficiently resolve the issue. Jedimasterlink (talk) 12:05, March 4, 2013 (UTC) ::::I guess my thought on it is that I would feel uncomfortable voting on a suggestion if I didn't have a clear idea of what a user has been doing and how it's affected the wiki in general — something that I personally don't believe you can entirely glean just from that user's contributions, since they're mostly contextless. I totally see people's point about how edit verification is kind of unnecessarily strict (and not really effective, come to think of it, since you could just edit a bunch of random pages at once and then vote), but I do think there should be some indication that you actually know the subject matter on some level, instead of gleaning it from a series of logs. Most of the votes made by "inactive" people have constituted the age-old argument of whether we need more admins or not — an argument that I think is based mostly on conjecture, because what is being missed is whether the admins that we already have are actually doing their jobs as efficiently as they should be. Over the past several months there have been a lot of issues that have just sat for several hours waiting for an admin to deal with them, when a more active user like Green Rupee could have taken care of things much faster. This is something that gets missed by a lot of people, though, because barring some really in-depth log comparisons, it requires you to actually be around to see stuff take place. As for our differing interpretation...I think the reason this is becoming an issue now and not earlier is because over time we've drifted more and more towards a "do we need more people with rights or is this superfluous?" outlook, as opposed to a "does this person deserve rights, or doesn't (s)he?". The latter requires just a quick look through their contributions, whereas the former (in my opinion, for the above reasons) requires a deeper understanding of what the wiki actually needs at the time of voting. So yeah, I think the rule we have now is kind of dumb. But I also think we need something a little more specific than "give a reason". ''Xykeb Yvolix '' 13:02, March 4, 2013 (UTC) You've made valid points. I'll get back to this if I can come up with either a relatively objective (?) way to judge someone's reasons or an entirely different third option. Jedimasterlink (talk) 21:03, March 4, 2013 (UTC)